InterDesign // Case Study

CLIENT PROFILE: INTERDESIGN

For over four decades, InterDesign has been establishing itself as a global leader in organizational products for the home. With facilities in the US, Asia, and Europe, their products are proudly sold in over 100 countries across the globe. Visit their site here: interdesignusa.com

Project Summary & Challenges

InterDesign's brand awareness among retailers and buyers was strong and established, but among consumers, brand awareness was very low. Having focused primarily in selling products online through Amazon and in big box retailers like Bed Bath & Beyond, Home Depot, Target, and Walmart, InterDesign had never invested in creating a custom product catalog website. After 43 years of success and growth it was finally time. Their greatest desire was to create an online presence to tell their story and engage with consumers on an emotional level through their creative innovations, wide range of organizational products, and their company culture.

Challenge #1: Introducing The InterDesign Culture

InterDesign functions like a large family. They care deeply about what they do and how they do it. They take pride in their products and their history. All of this factors into their brand identity, and it was what we discovered quickly as the appeal to consumers and retailers. Our challenge was to communicate this as their culture with creative storytelling and use of imagery.

Challenge #2: Consumer Engagement

People love to organize their stuff and that is what InterDesign is good at. What they weren't good at was translating that brand essence into an online presence. A big challenge for us was creating an emotional connection between InterDesign's products and the consumer. We needed to engage, entice, inform, inspire, and connect with a cohesion of design elements, content areas, and product details information.

Challenge #3: Letting the Products Tell the Story

Possibly the greatest challenge in this project was defining the information architecture surrounding InterDesign's products, collections, and innovations. Each had their own unique layout needs with unique goals while simultaneously working together within a product database infrastructure. This complexity required us to think strategically within the architecture phase.

"It’s been a journey from start to finish, seeing our brand strategy turn into wireframes, then morph into design, and then see products turn into beautifully designed pages that give our consumers (finally!) a reason to stay." -- Ann Faber, Marketing Communications Manager

Our Solutions:

Prioritize Content Creation

Each of InterDesign's collections and subsequent products has a story, and outside of the existing product description on Amazon, these stories had never been shared before. In order to accomplish our goals of communicating the culture, we had to prioritize content creation early within the architecture phase. As we defined content areas within layouts and design templates, we identified key content areas where new content was needed. This included copy and images that would support the personality of the products themselves.

Let the Products Be the Heroes

The InterDesign brand is clean, simple, and very much focused on its products. Therefore, our team realized early on that the products had to be the heroes of the website design. Utilizing clean product photography, strategic areas of whitespace, and modern typography we were able to take the existing InterDesign brand and translate it into a new online presence. For consumer engagement, the products do the heavy lifting with the minimal design supporting a streamlined product browsing experience.

Focus on Infrastructure

The initial goal for InterDesign's site was to launch as a B2B catalog site, yet still have the ability to scale and go fully eCommerce with a B2C framework in the future. To do so, we developed a fully capable infrastructure that could handle that growth in the next phase of development. The backend database handles relationships and variables for product types, innovations, finishes and styles, collections, and much more. With over 10,000 total product SKU's, our goal was to launch with a little over 2,000 unique products.

The Results:

Our process with InterDesign was very hands-on and conversational to help understand how their products were organized internally and the goals for each aspect of information. For their collections and innovations the goals were to inspire and engage. For the products the goals were to inform and sell. These conversations helped us solve the information architecture complexities surrounding their product relationships and set InterDesign up for success as they grow into phase two of the site.

The success of this project is due largely to our ipso team's ability to collaborate with InterDesign's fabulous marketing team to think strategically from the beginning. We forged into new territory with this 43 year old company, and to do so required careful attention to creating trust in the relationship. We asked a lot of questions, guided, consulted, listened, and empowered InterDesign to see their brand come to life on a platform where it had never existed before.

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